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Zanu-PF Central Committee members attend the 107th Extraordinary Central Committee meeting at Zanu-PF Headquarters in Harare today.-Picture by Tawanda Mudimu

Felex Share Senior Reporter
The Zanu-pf Extraordinary Congress will today extend the tenure of Central Committee members to 2022 to enable party members to expend energy on development, President Emmerson Mnangagwa revealed yesterday.

The five-year term of the Central Committee members was supposed to expire in 2019 when the next Congress was due. Zanu-pf resolved to hold an Extraordinary Congress, a move that will see the revolutionary party aligning its elective assembly with the national elective calendar.

Zimbabwe holds harmonised elections next year. Effectively zanu-pf is no longer going to have another Congress in 2019.

Addressing the 107th zanu-pf Central Committee meeting in Harare yesterday, President Mnangagwa, who is the also zanu-pf’s First Secretary, told Central Committee members that they would stay put for another five years.

“As you are aware I am completing the term of my predecessor and our past President and First Secretary Cde Robert Mugabe between now and the next elections in a few months,” he said.

“Given that overbearing fact, we cannot afford divisions, which weaken our focus and dissipate our collective energies in wasteful intra-party conflicts. We need every vote, including that of our members who may have been misled by the (G40) cabal and whom we must now rehabilitate and bring back into the party fold.

“Lest there is confusion, may I point out that the Extraordinary Congress we are set to have tomorrow (today) is not an elective one in respect of the Central Committee and all other organs of the party. The Congress will therefore extend the tenure of you, the current Central Committee members, which would have ordinarily expired in 2019. I extend your life by another five years.

“This means that, luckily, you now stand to serve the party for another five more uninterrupted years until the next Congress, which falls due in 2022. I hope this clarification allays all anxieties and stops the jostling that had begun to negatively affect the party. Meanwhile provinces will be permitted to fill vacancies where they exist.”

The announcement was met with wild jubilation from the Central Committee members. President Mnangagwa said the Youth and Women’s Leagues needed rejuvenation as they were victims of counter-revolutionary activities carried out by the G40 cabal.

“I am particularly concerned with the situation in both the Women and Youth Leagues, which were the greatest victims of the counter revolutionaries who had captured the party,” he said.

“These two vital organs of our party must receive our urgent but compassionate attention so we put them back on the rails. In respect of the Youth League, conscious efforts must be made to ensure vigorous interventions from the Commissariat so that the youths reconnect with the ethos of the struggle and the value-system of the party as it has evolved over the years.”

President Mnangagwa said he would announce the new Women’s League leadership today.